The title of this elegant literary tale set in Melbourne might well have been Body Friends — plural — rather than Body Friend because the unnamed narrator’s bonds with not one, but two key characters comprise the story’s core. And while it’s Australian author Katherine Brabon’s third novel, it’s the first to be published in the United States.

The action begins in late summer, five years ago. The pace is appropriately and effectively slow to start as we learn that the narrator walks with a limp, has an autoimmune disease, and, despite being “not yet thirty,” is scheduled to undergo hip-replacement surgery.

Autoimmune diseases occur when the body’s immune system releases antibodies that mistakenly attack healthy cells. Examples include Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, and celiac disease, among dozens of others. Most of them aren’t terminal, but many can be progressive and cause a wide variety of severe, long-term symptoms.

Post-surgery, the story moves forward cautiously and carefully. The narrator is tired and angry when her loving yet bewildered boyfriend, Tomasz, resumes his energetic routine of work and sporting activities, while she’s left alone to cope with her “agonizingly slow” recovery.

In a rehab pool, she becomes aware of another woman — Frida — who resembles her in appearance and who has a limp that mirrors her own. In the context of this encounter, she invites us to consider whose pain we can experience and whose we can’t:

“Even if I am watching those I love most in agony, I feel hurt because of the emotional suffering that pain brings or simply the knowledge that pain exists in them. I do not experience their physical suffering, in the common conception of empathy being the capacity to feel another’s pain. I think this might be a truth.”

Yet with Frida, it’s different. The narrator believes she and her new acquaintance truly grasp one another’s pain. Each knows how it feels for the other because their own discomfort is so similar.

Over time, the narrator is “taken entirely into Frida’s world” — one of walking and swimming and feeling stronger and better, though what “better” means in a body afflicted with a chronic illness must be redefined from one day to the next.

When the “cloudy feeling” of pain returns, she avoids the pool, and a second friend, Sylvia, enters the story. The narrator sees herself mirrored in Sylvia, too, but in a different way: Frida was all about movement and exercise, a choice to be active; Sylvia is all about rest and idleness, a choice to be inactive:

“It seemed I was stuck between the two women. When I went to Frida, Sylvia cried. When I stayed with Sylvia, Frida was angry, told me it was not healthy.”

Though Frida and Sylvia aren’t fully formed characters with lives apart from the narrator, she warns us it would be a mistake to assume the two are merely aspects of her own psyche. Rather, like the swimming pool where the narrator and Frida meet, there’s more beneath the surface. A tension exists between activity and rest; each has its own pros, cons, and consequences. Reflects the narrator:

“It would have been easy to say that I needed both of them: that the relentless physicality of Frida pushed me into the languishing state that was being with Sylvia; that the fog-and-stone feeling that came over me on the days I spent with Sylvia was a necessary pause which, being tolerable for only a limited amount of time, drove me to seek the movement and the cold of the pool with Frida. The only conclusion I would have been certain of at the time was that such formulations would have felt like an intolerable violence to me, a piercing and pinning down of story and logic, narrative and symbolism, when none of it resembled what it felt like.”

Does this story of chronic pain end with a miracle cure? A tragic death? Both? Neither? Readers who anticipate any sort of predictable outcome may be pleasantly surprised to discover that author Brabon has conjured something far better. Body Friend’s pitch-perfect conclusion offers intimacy, knowledge, and, perhaps, a precious glimmer of understanding.

Marcie Geffner is a writer, editor, and book reviewer in Ventura, California.

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